This isn't an exploit, but it's something that I could see Blizzard adjusting with just a small tweak; Make him throw up his 99% shield at 70% regardless of what he is doing at the moment.

But exploit? Not really. The fight just has a lenient enrage timer, and low raid damage in p1 if you're slaughtering all the oozes and eating a puddle here and there. This allows people to durdle for 8 minutes :P

Originally Posted by Raiju

There are tons of ways to skip boss abilities and/or phases through every expansion, even cataclysm. Out of interest how did you kill magmaw heroic? By any chance was it by waiting at 26%, then bringing the head down and burning it below 10% with everything popped essentially guaranteeing the kill if noone screwed up? As for classes, there are way too many where X class ability causes Y mechanic to be ignored. Dispersion probably caused more balance issues than anything else... between all the fights like baleroc and madness.

Well, even if you did that, you still had to deal with some portion of Phase 3, just not as long, but still enough to cause issues if you didn't attempt to respect the raid damage/constructs. Shortening one phase is different than skipping TWO phases which span 5-6 minutes combined.

Really, I have to admit that I find it odd that some people can even defend this tactic as "legit" -

If you could skip the meteor and leg phase of ragnaros, would you not see it as an exploit?
If you could skip the Valkyrs on Lich king, would you not see it as an exploit?
If you could dps a boss while it was going through it's RP speeches to kill it, would you not see it as an exploit?

if you got enough dps; no.
if you got enough dps; no.
if you got enough dps; no.

well i dont think its exploiting since you use the intended machanics witch were given to you by the devs themselfes its not like they could just let the stack on boss not allow to get past lets say 40-60 stacks its not like you use any class specific skill to break the mechanics

the ultimate answer's to all rogue issues :

-Rogues might still be dealing with the changes to combo points {2014}

Boss is not supposed to be damaged after he drops to 70% hp, as witnessed by the shield that is put on him by the monstrosity. That he can't gain the shield while casting is bad design, not a thumb's-up to skip phases.

Really, I have to admit that I find it odd that some people can even defend this tactic as "legit" -

If you could skip the meteor and leg phase of ragnaros, would you not see it as an exploit?
If you could skip the Valkyrs on Lich king, would you not see it as an exploit?
If you could dps a boss while it was going through it's RP speeches to kill it, would you not see it as an exploit?

I would. And I have no respect for anyone who doesn't. Fights are ment to be dealt with. Why would they design two phases, if they're okay with you rolling over them due to the boss not being able to summon the monstrosity during a cast?

Except you couldn't do that. The lightning still had to travel through every single person, requiring intense usage of raid cooldowns and healing as everyone's taking lightning ticks.

Why does it matter? Is it not an exploit because it's not a top-end guild doing it?

I never said I agreed with using that tactic. And I've always thought it was stupid they didn't fix it.

We never did that, no. We just spread out and healed till it died :s.

It's not legit nor an exploit. Skipping phases due to insane high dps has always happened, and this one is a cheesy tactic to do it.

On normal kills we often had him dropping to 66% when he was doing scalpel and reshape life and transitioned only after it.

A real form of an exploit on that fight would be if you managed to make his 99% damage reduction to fall off and then kill him.

---------- Post added 2012-12-19 at 06:55 PM ----------

Originally Posted by tielknight

That is not how Blizzard has often defined a exploit. You can be doing something that is allowed but if it is not the intended way that it should be done, i.e. stacking a debuff way past what would be considered normal and bypassing a vast majority of a fight, then it can be considered a exploit.
Doing something that is not allowed is often thrown under the Cheating part of things.

I know very well what they define as an exploit, and I can say with 100% certainty, this ain't one, no suspensions will be given.

Using boss mechanics to kill the boss is not an exploit. Just because it was not the intended way to kill it doesn't make it an exploit or cheating. They played within the rules of the fight. Props to them.

Please explain to me why they fixed fire mages on this fight then that allowed them to skip the whole of phase 2?

Because it was a bug that one class could kill a mob instantly with one certain spell. Having your whole raid do very hard burst and use the class abilities correct is not.
If a blizz desginer has not thought about being able to zerg a boss that gets a debuff with several thousand +%dps he probably should get fired anyway.

They fixed all the cleave mechanics that functioned in a specific way in order to prevent unintended damage on all encounters where they could be used for that purpose.

You are just going around in a circle. This is clearly unintended, for the same way classes would transfer huge dots to the monstrosity and kill it in seconds. If you are skipping ANY phases in a fight, it's unintended. They didn't add phases to a fight just for the fun of it.

You are just going around in a circle. This is clearly unintended, for the same way classes would transfer huge dots to the monstrosity and kill it in seconds. If you are skipping ANY phases in a fight, it's unintended. They didn't add phases to a fight just for the fun of it.

On the other hand, if the boss' mechanics are broken in so many ways that the fight seems retarded to start with, you might as well cancel as much as you can of it to avoid the RNG of wtf-healer-turned-construct-when-a-tank-was-supposed-to.... Remove the boss, add a non-vehicle fight in his place.

I refuse to believe that anybody who takes his class remotely seriously is enjoying getting forced into playing what seems like a different class for any encounter.

The timing is pretty tough too, not something I would say we will be able to 1 shot every time if it's not hotfixed. We had several pulls where we'd get to ~72% and timers just didn't line up right, we'd have to refresh the debuff or it would fall off and the tank would get an accidental crit and push it over, or we'd have to refresh, but scalpel wasn't coming soon enough to enable the burn.

This strategy looks easy, and it sort of is, but it's tricky to execute. I will say, though, that it was only our 11th pull on the boss, having started out with 2 healers, learning the 'proper' strategy, planning to stack the debuff to burn him to ~20-30% to have a short phase 3, but when we started seeing how many stacks we could get to if we eliminated any extra damage to the boss, and tried to limit auto attacks from the constructs (some are unavoidable), we saw this as a possibility. We had no idea if the boss even would die, hence the crazy laughter at the end of our video. We thought there was a good chance he would go to 1hp and be immune until the monstrosity was killed. Not sure how many pulls we did with 1 healer setup, but I think it was 6-7?